Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Is the JFK Assassination Ancient History or a Current Event that's Relevant Today?

Some of the FBI records on the assassination of JFK that have been released.

More than that are still being withheld - over 3500 documents remain withheld in full or over 30,000 pages while another 35,000 documents remain withheld in part, with redactions.

These still sealed JFK Assassination records make it relevant.

If what happened at Dealey Plaza is ancient history and not relevant today, then why are so many JFK assassination records still being withheld by the government for reasons of national security?

Why does our nation’s security depend on the government keeping the American public from knowing what information is contained in over 3,000 documents – 30,000 pages of records?

John Newman, whose new book “Where Angels Tread Lightly” deals with what we have learned from the release of these records so far, had said that not only Dealey Plaza, but the Archives II is a crime scene, as it has possession of most of the evidence in the murder as well as the relevant government documents that would give us a pretty good picture of what happened at Dealey Plaza if they would only let us read them.

But the clock is ticking, the countdown has begun and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is making preparations for the final release of the last of the still sealed records by October 2017, as the law requires.

The JFK Act remains in effect until that time the Archivist of the United States (AOTUS) informs the President, Congress and the American people that the last JFK assassination record has been released to the public as the JFK Act of 1992 prescribes, and the date is set for October 26, 2017.

Now, over 50 years later, it is in the national interest to release all of these records, but it won’t be easy and won’t be without a fight against the national security state agencies who want many of these records to remain sealed indefinitely - and intend to ask the next president of the United States, whoever he or she may be, to keep them sealed, and only he/she can.

According to the JFK Act, passed by congress and signed by President G. H. W. Bush on October 26, 1992 - only the president can continue the withholding of the records, and only if the “continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm to military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations, and the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”

Will the nation’s security be preserved? Will the government and various agencies survive? Will the heavens fall?

The consequences should not be that catastrophic, but putting the last pieces of the Dealey Plaza puzzle into place will certainly be enlightening, change our perspectives, re-write history and certainly damage the reputation of the agencies of government – CIA – FBI – NSA – WHCA – ONI – Secret Service – who have covered up the truth for the past half-century and should be directly threatened by what’s in the documents.

According to Jeff Morley [http://jfkfacts.org/ ] – Martha Murphy, of NARA, recently corrected an Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) statement that one percent of the total records in the collection are still being withheld. Since there are over 350,000 documents in the collection that total nearly 4 million pages, they estimated that one percent as 3,000 documents, but have recently obtained a better count. According to Morley, “Murphy acknowledged that she had misplaced the decimal point. The actual figure is 1.1 percent, she said.”

“We currently have documented in the [JFK records] database 3,603 documents withheld in full [out] of a total of 318,866 documents in the database. So that comes to 1.1 percent,” Murphy wrote.

Morley notes that, "While the Assassination Records Review Board, an independent civilian panel, which oversaw the declassification of JFK records in the 1990s, had first used the 1 percent figure, the exact number of documents still off limits to the public was not known until now."

In a second email, Murphy wrote, “we have found five of those documents which were actually released in the collection as redacted,” leaving 3,598 records that remain withheld in full. Murphy stressed the figure would likely change again as archivists compare the data base to the actual records in preparation for their scheduled release in October 2017. The Archives does not yet have an accurate agency by agency breakdown of the withheld records, Murphy said.

According to Morley, "In her April 10 presentation, Murphy made it clear that all withheld information will be released in October 2017, as mandated by the 1992 JFK Records Act, unless the President orders otherwise."

Murphy said that archives staffers are currently perfecting the index because there are errors or missing information in the index as to the status of records and intends to post the released information on the web and then integrate the newly released records into existing files.

According to an FOIA attorney who was present at the NARA public forum, Murphy also stated that 11% of the documents in the collection are partially withheld, meaning they have redactions. 11% of 318,866 documents is 35,075 documents with redactions. So the current numbers are 3,598 documents withheld in full and 35,075 withheld in part. It would be helpful if the Archives would provide page counts and agencies of origin for these categories.

Indeed, it would be helpful if the NARA would but they haven’t and they won’t, and I don’t believe they will post these remaining one-point-one-percenters on line in 2017 because they won’t post the five documents they just located now.

As former House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) investigator Dan Hardway recently told me, “we need an army of researchers with lap tops and scanners to go to the Archives II and scan and post these records as they are released so everyone can read them.”

We are up against a tired National Archives staff, a Congress reluctant to conduct proper oversight, and the government agencies and their staff of attorneys handsomely paid by the taxpayers to keep these records secret, and we must summon up the energy, masses and will to oppose them.

That’s why we have formed a new organization – Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA) that picks up where the organizations that lobbied for the passage of the JFK Act in 1992 left off and to continue the work we began twenty years ago to see the JFK Act to its full completion.

Over the next few years CAPA will be:

- Correcting the mainstream media spin on political assassinations and secrecy in government;
- Making political assassinations and government transparency campaign issues in local, state and the national elections;
- Getting all of the political candidates to support open records and transparency and announce their positions publicly in their campaign platforms;
- Have each presidential candidate declare their intention whether to release all of the JFK Assassination records or keep them sealed and to pledge their support for open records;
- Hold a Congressional Briefing in Washington on the JFK Act to focus attention on the destroyed, missing and still withheld records and provide a platform for witnesses to testify;
- Engage the NARA staff to expedite the release of the records, to post the requested documents on line as they have promised, to update their public index and make their private index available to researchers, work more efficiently with researchers and to see that Congress properly oversees the JFK Act so that is enforced;
- Engage Congressman on the relevant oversight committees and their Congressional staff to see that the JFK Act is properly enforced, and hold public hearings on the JFK Act on the destroyed, missing and still withheld records and release the MLK HSCA, Church Committee and other relevant records that are still being withheld.

As an association of independent researchers we seek the complete release of all of the remaining JFK Assassination records by October 26, 2017 and we intend to ratchet up our efforts to educate the public, the media and the government as to why it is now in the national interest to have all of these records released.

Saturday, May 9, 2015

In his book on the assassination of President Kennedy “A Cruel and Shocking Act,” Philip Shenon says that no one person can read all of the millions of pages of documents that have and are being released under the JFK Records Act, and no one expects anyone to.

Serious journalists like Shenon and historical researchers are expected to read the records that relate to their field of interest and subject matter, and most of the significant records are referenced in books that are basic to understanding the topic at hand, something that Shenon apparently hasn’t done or he would know better.

In adapting similar techniques used by scientists in making new breakthroughs and astronomers in locating other planets in the galaxy to historical archival research I call your attention to a blog post by the Archivist of the United States (AOTUS) David Ferriero, who recently reported on the discovery of thousands of letters and official documents penned by Walt Whitman that had previously escaped the attention of scholars that were sitting on the shelves of the Archives all along.

Whitman scholar Ken Price went to the Archives in search of new records, armed only with the recognition of Whitman’s unique handwriting style that was burned in his brain, and the knowledge that Whitman had worked as a secretary in the Justice Department for a few years during the Civil War. Price expected to find a few documents after searching the relevant records but he was surprised to find some right away, and then more and more, and so far has found thousands of previously unknown Whitman documents that will take Whitman scholars years to read and analyze.

In the same fashion, JFK researchers focus on their area of interest, and if Shenon had bothered, he would have found that besides the Mexico City “Twist Party,” there are literally dozens of similar cases of false reports attempting to link the assassination to Fidel Castro.

I have developed the Three Time Hits technique in which I begin a file on any subject that happens to be mentioned in diverse areas – which called my attention to Collins Radio, the International Rescue Committee, the Pan Am Bank of Miami and the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler.

In addition, Peter Dale Scott, using his “negative template” thesis focuses on the records being withheld – so they narrow down the search for us by simply refusing to allow us to see certain records. And while they say the amount of documents still being withheld for reasons of national security is less than one percent of all the documents in the JFK Collection, there’s so many still being withheld that they can’t give us a number and tell us how many.

We will learn that figure in a few years, in October 2017 when the JFK Act requires all of the government records on the assassination to be released to the public, and they will narrow the most significant documents down even more when the various agencies request the President of the United States – whoever he or she may be, to continue withholding specific records.

While we will be waiting anxiously for that day to come, we will also ask and require all of the Presidential candidates in the next election to state for the record what they will do – release all of the remaining records or grant the agencies request to keep certain records sealed from the public.

In the meantime, as we peruse the most recently released records, we don’t have to read them all, just the ones that concern us and the ones they didn’t want us to see, but we can focus on a few specific areas of interest – such as the CIA plans to kill Fidel Castro, as those plans have been related to the murder at Dealey Plaza.

As former FBI agent Bill Turner simply put it – “The CIA had plans to kill Fidel Castro but one of those plans was turned around to kill JFK, and pin the blame on Castro.”

But which one of the plans was flipped? It wasn’t one of the more popularized CIA-Mafia plots that were going to utilize poison - it had to be a later plan, one that included killing Castro as JFK was killed - with a high powered rifle as he rode along in an open jeep, as he was known to do.

Watergate burglar Eugene Martinez was a JMWAVE maritime boat captain who said that he personally inserted many commandos into Cuba, “with high powered rifles with scopes that were not going to be used to hunt rabbits.”

One such insertion, made by the CIA raider ship “Rex” deposited a number of commandos into Cuba with high powered rifles on October 31, 1963, and they were captured and confessed to having been trained by the CIA and sent to Cuba to kill Castro.

And from the recently released records we learn there were several such plans, including the use of a bazooka in the plot that involved Syliva Odio’s father Amador Odio, and the Patherfinder plot, that we only learned about because the CIA kept the Patherfinder file in the NPIC safe area of JMWAVE instead of where it should have been filed, and the NPIC technicians knew about it.

They said Patherfinder was a plan to shoot Castro with a high powered rifle as he drove by in an open jeep near the Dupont estate near Havana, where he was known to frequent, but that plan was “disapproved,” which I take to mean that it went through channels to the National Security Council and Cuban Task Force group in Washington and maybe even to JFK or RFK and they “disapproved” it.

Another, similar plan was envisioned after it was learned that Castro visited Mary Hemingway at Hemingway’s house when she was packing his papers and belongings following his suicide, and the idea of trying to kill Castro there was breached to RFK and the Kennedy baiters try to use the “Hemingway plot” as an example of RFK’s knowledge of the plans to kill Castro.

When the CIA’s Desmond Fitzgerald briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff on September 25, 1963 he mentioned they were adapting the Valkyrie plan to kill Hitler to Cuba, and the Valkyrie plan included two Phases, one overt and the other secret, with the overt plan to mobilize the Home Army to put down any revolt by foreign slave laborers in Germany, a plan that was actually approved by Hitler.

The secret Phase 2 part of the plan was to “dispose” of Hitler and blame it on the SS and Gestapo, but the attempt to kill Hitler with a bomb in July 1944 failed to kill him and hundreds, some say thousands of people were rounded up and executed or like General Rommel, permitted to commit suicide. Who says a lot of people can’t keep a secret?

While the bomb didn’t work, attacking a passing motorcade was a successful Modus Operandi in the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which sparked World War I, and by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in 1942 - Operation Anthropoid to kill Nazi SS Reinhard Heydrich when his car slowed down to make a hair pin turn very similar to the one at Dealey Plaza.

The French OAS also tried to kill President deGaul in a “military style ambush” of his motorcade in 1962, but according to the official report, he was saved by the endurance of his Michelin tires.

Just as in the Valkyrie plot, it appears that the specific plan to kill Castro with a high powered rifle was submitted to the National Security Council and the Cuban Task Force as well as JFK and RFK for approval, but was “disapproved,” but that RFK was personally introduced to some of the JMWAVE CIA officers and anti-Castro Cuban commandos at their training site, so he would have had direct contact with those who were engaged in the plan to kill Castro that was redirected to JFK at Dealey Plaza.

Army Ranger Captain Bradley Ayers, who trained teams of JMWAVE commandos, wrote two books, “The War that Never Was,” that was published by Bobs-Merrell, who kept an office in the Texas School Book Depository. When William Harvey left the CIA as head of the Cuban Task Force he worked for Bobs-Merrell, and personally vetted Ayers’ book, eliminating key elements, some of which were included in Ayers’ second book “The Zenith Secret.”

In the second “Zenith” book, not vetted by the CIA, Ayers recalls meeting RFK twice, once with JMWAVE officials at a CIA safe house on a golf course, and a second time in the field, where RFK was flown in to the Everglades swamp camp to meet his team of commandos in training. Both of these incidents indicate that RFK and JFK were being set up – getting their approval to assassinate Castro, and then flipping the target to JFK at Dealey Plaza, a murder that was to be blamed on Castro, just as the Valkyrie plan was to blame the assassination of Hitler on the SS and Gestapo.

As Professor John Newman said in his talk at the Bethesda conference, and should relate in his new book “Where Angels Tread Lightly,” these plans have multiple levels to them, one visible and the other not so easily discerned, and at some point in time those who decided to kill JFK had to keep Castro from being killed because, as Newman puts it, “Castro had to be alive on November 22” because part of the plan was to blame him for the Dealey Plaza ambush.

So as we consider requesting and reading specific records being released under the JFK Act, we should not only focus on those records of special interest to our research, but also consider the records they have been denying us and will have to release to us by law, and concentrate on the records that have to do with the few CIA plans to kill Fidel Castro with a high-powered rifle, one of which was redirected to JFK at Dealey Plaza.

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

As a research technique, while reading the HSCA volumes, I began opening files on subjects that came up repeatedly in diverse areas - more than twice - taking Ian Fleming's adage - "First time is happenstance, second time is coincidence, but a third time is enemy action."

That's how I got onto Collins Radio, Pan Am Bank of Miami, Southland Center, International Rescue Committee and now Valkyrie.

In the course of my research the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler has come up five times - in diverse areas and makes me think I may be on to something.

1) The first time the Valkyre plot came up was in a phone conversation I had with Volkmar Schmidt, who acknowledged that in his February 1963 conversation with Oswald at a party at his house, he mentioned the Valkyrie Plot and suggested to Oswald that General Walker should be assassinated as Hitler should have been. Schmidt said he personally knew some of the participants in the Valkyrie plot.

3) In late September 1963 Ruth Hyde Paine visited her husband Michael's mother - Ruth Forbes Paine Young, who was Mary Bancroft's close friend and traveling companion to Europe. After leaving the Young's residence near Philadelphia Ruth Paine drove to New Orleans and picked up Marina and the rifle and drove them to Texas while Oswald went to Mexico.

5) The 11/22/63 alibi for the owner of the TSBD - D. H. Byrd was that he was on a hunting safari in Africa with a German "Baron" whose father was reported by OSS X-2 to possibly be an "assassination expert" and after World War II lived with one of the ministers selected for the new government after Hitler's overthrow and was a valuable double agent for OSS in Africa who co-authored a manifesto in support of the Valkyrie plotters.

Now my threshold for bingo was three but here we have five separate cases where the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler comes up in the course of events surrounding the assassination of JFK.

"The plan had a code name Valkyrie, and it would be developed at two levels with two sets of orders. Officially Valkyrie was a scheme to activate units of the Home Army to seize population centers in case of a rebellion by the foreign slave laborer sin Germany. Behind this facade the plan was to evolve into a complete takeover of the government by the Army.

"Phase One - plan for mobilizing the Reserve Army. Purpose: to crush mutiny of slave laborers.

This part of the plan was submitted through channels and approved by Hitler himself.

"Phase Two - the second, secret plan: Item 1- Disposal of Hitler. Item 2 - Preparation of orders upon Hitler's death...Direct the Reserve Army to undertake the following - Occupy first the city of Berlin...Principle objectives: Imprisonment of key Nazi and SS officials, occupation of vital government buildings, railroad stations and other government centers, especially broadcast stations. Immediate command of the mass media, newspapers, wireless radio - cannot be over stressed. The conspiracy alone must speak. Orders from Hitler's East Prussian HQ must be entirely isolated and contained."

"The conspiracy alone must speak."

Another twist to the Valkyrie plan was a Psychwar aspect to blame the assassination of Hitler on the Gestapo and SS as an excuse to round them up.

Forman says that while Dulles agent Gisevius supported the coup he was against the bomb plot. He told Von Stauffenberg "I just I have the feeling we'll never succeed. I'm not speaking through fear. But I have a feeling very few of us will be alive this time next year, regardless of what happens with your bomb."

And he was right.

But the adaption of Valkyrie as carried out at Dealey Plaza succeeded.